Description
Ten years have passed since the ground-breaking project at UBC. In this time, Wikipedia has been shown to be a resource to engage with, rather than avoid. Wikipedia assignments have become mainstream in universities in North America and Canada while students across the world are now also making connections between their learning and using their digital labour to surface knowledge online to fuel discovery and understanding. This is even more relevant for improving health information literacy where poor access to information contributes to negative health outcomes globally.
In the UK, hosting a Wikimedian to embed the creation of OER in the curriculum has represented a shift in terms our understanding of the role of Wikipedia in academic contexts. Now, for the first time, Wikimedia UK has collated enough case studies of student engagement in Wikipedia assignments at universities the length and breadth of the British Isles to produce its own compilation of best practice to rival its US counterparts.
This presentation discusses the first 27 months of one such UK university; highlighting its efforts working with Wikipedia both as an ally in its mission to disseminate verifiable open knowledge and an important tool in its information literacy and digital skills strategy; delivering an informed understanding of how Wikipedia operates and supporting both student-created OER and student-led projects. It will showcase stories of student empowerment; providing exemplars of how students have engaged with, and been motivated by, researching and publishing their scholarship online in a real-world application of their teaching and learning.
Importantly, these stories will be told by the students themselves through showing, as part of the presentation, short video interviews. This presentation will also combine these stories of empowerment with key performance indicators and detailed metrics for any open educator to make the case why working with Wikipedia is a worthwhile return of investment that senior managers cannot afford to pass up… literally: for their students and for the betterment of Open Education across the world.
References
- Selwyn, Neil; Gorard, Stephen. “Students’ use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness”. The Internet and Higher Education. 28: 28–34. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004.
- “YouGov | British people trust Wikipedia more than the news”. YouGov: What the world thinks.
- “Jim Groom on the Wiki Education Project ‘Murder Madness and Mayhem’ at OER16”. media.ed.ac.uk.
Participants
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Martin Hawksey
joined 6 years, 7 months ago -
ALT
joined 6 years, 9 months ago